With the book launch, plus managing the Naples Design project, plus other creative Big Picture stuff, I’m constantly looking to upgrade everything in my bag of organizational tricks.
And although I love the simplicity of the REMINDERS program that comes with my Mac, I’ve googled some other possibilities from time to time. [You would, too, if your punch list for the Florida project had 102 items on it in its first incarnation.]
This week I found another app –– I can’t remember which one –– that I decided to explore given its high Apple Store ratings, only to find that it required me to rank my to do list items into these 3 categories:
- MUST do
- SHOULD do &
- WANT to do
And that way of thinking stopped me dead in my tracks.
Yes, I understand that there are things that more or less MUST happen –– otherwise, life becomes significantly more complicated and difficult.
But it was really the idea of the “SHOULDs” –– as though they were all things I would be letting someone/myself/the world down if I neglected them –– and especially the fact that the “WANTS” were somehow a) in third place and b) somehow never going to be my MUSTS or my SHOULDs.
Are you getting what I’m saying?
According to this system’s nomenclature, I’d be living a life where the things I WANT to do are never going to be in the same category as the things I MUST DO or SHOULD DO. And they would always be third on my list.
Yikes … who wants THAT life.
I do like the Steven Covey 7 HABITS system of the four quadrant grid which required you to decide if things were A) URGENT & IMPORTANT, B) URGENT but NOT IMPORTANT, C) NOT URGENT but IMPORTANT, and D) NOT URGENT & NOT IMPORTANT.
For a while that system can make your head spin, but it really is a useful way of training yourself to examine if each task is truly important (or not) and simultaneously truly urgent (or not).
And right now while at the same time I feel it’s tremendously helpful to break down my list into as many single action steps as possible, that can be utterly overwhelming.
There’s something great about the Teamly system (I’ve never used their software) of having only five things on your plate per day.
Right now, however, exhausted by the volume of my Wants, Musts and Shoulds and totally unable to pare them down to five items, I’m crossing everything off but one item:
Napping.
Good night, Naples.
N
For
